UAMS, UA, Arkansas Children’s Research Institute enter women’s health research collaboration agreement

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A health care collaboration will soon make women’s health research more accessible in Arkansas.

Officials from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, and the Arkansas Children's Research Institute announced Monday that they would collaborate on a yearlong project to make decades of maternal health research available for future researchers.

The project is funded by a $310,000 grant from the National Institute of Health, which was awarded to professor Lawrence Cornett of the UAMS Medicine Department.

The grant supplements a five-year $18.4 million grant from the NIH that allows UA Fayetteville and the Children’s Research Institute to develop software tools and processes to streamline the use of large maternal health datasets.

“It’s a tremendously rich data set,” Cornett said. “It isn’t replicated anywhere else. The beauty of this supplement is that it shows the NIH recognizes it’s important to support this research being done in Arkansas.”

Cornett added that the data is currently “kind of tucked away” and the project...